Recover deleted hard drive on Mac

[redas]

hi,

I accidentally deleted some valuable information on my Mac. They were on a Seagate external hard drive I bought a few years ago. The files included movies, images, music, etc. Somehow it was my archive drive which I added files to it from time to time. Just a few days ago I connected the drive and encountered an empty disk which I suspected it was totally formated/deleted by my daughter.

Is there any way to get those files unerased? Very important files and data were included. Please help.

Tnx

 

[Crono]

Try Recuva if you can put the drive in a Windows PC (or have Windows via Boot Camp)

EDIT: Actually, not sure if Recuva can recover files deleted from a Mac partition

For Mac there's Drisk Drill and other tools, but I can't vouch for it personally. In any case, avoid making any changes like installing anything or downloading anything to that drive because the chances of the deleted data being overwritten goes up.

EDIT 2: Missed that you said it was totally formatted. You probably can't easily recover any data from that.

 

[KLin]

dropbox ftw

 

[Crono]

dropbox ftw

There's also SpiderOak, OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, OwnCloud (uses your own server), etc. I use SyncThing to automatically back things up locally and manually back up to offline drives/flash drives, as well.

 

[gorcorps]

The last time you accessed them was a few years ago? I think you're SOL

 

[lxskllr]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

 

[Jaepheth]

Probably not relevant anymore, but made me think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEvYETWVK6M&t=127

 

[midwestfisherman]

Would Spinrite help the OP?

 

[cfenton]

I've used Disk Drill and Stellar Phoenix on OSX in the past. I prefer the interface of Disk Drill, but both have worked well for me. If nothing new has been written to the drive since it was formatted, you might still be OK. It really depends on how the data was deleted (secure delete/quick format/etc.). You should be able to download a trial of either of those programs that will show you what it can recover. You'll have to buy the program if you want to recover, but that's better than losing the data. There are probably freeware programs available, but I'm not familiar with those.